Biographies
of Prominent Quebec and Canadian

Historical Figures

Percy
Ellwood Corbett

(1892-1983)

Damien-Claude
Bélanger,

Department
of History,

McGill University

Jurist
and soldier, was born at Tyne Valley, Prince Edward Island.
He was educated at Quebec's Huntingdon Academy and at McGill University.
After receiving his M.A. in 1915, Corbett was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship,
but postponed it to serve with great distinction as an officer in the
Canadian Expeditionary Force in France . Severely injured at the Battle of the Somme,
he was awarded the Military Cross. After the Great War he resumed his
studies at Oxford University and was a Fellow of All Souls College
from 1920 to 1927. During that time he served as an assistant legal
advisor to the League of Nation's International Labour Office and obtained
a Licence ès droit from the Sorbonne. In 1924 he was
appointed professor of Roman law at McGill University's
Faculty of Law. One of the Faculty's rising stars, Corbett served as
its Dean from 1928 until 1936. Under his direction, the Faculty of Law
recruited both F. R. Scott and John P. Humphrey as professors. Serving
briefly as McGill's acting principal, Corbett continued to teach Roman
and International law until 1942, when he left Canada and joined the faculty of Yale University . He became an American citizen in
1947. From 1951 to 1958 Corbett taught at Princeton University's Center for International Studies.
He spent the rest of his career teaching at the University of Virginia and at Lehigh University.
An international jurist who frequently argued for a Canadian-American
rapprochement, P. E. Corbett authored a volume on The Settlement
of Canadian-American Disputes (1937) in the series of twenty-five
studies on Canadian-American relations sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, and attended three of the conferences on Canadian-American
affairs organized by the Endowment between 1935 and 1941. In the October
1930 issue of the Dalhousie Review he published Canada's first in-depth scholarly examination
of anti-Americanism.